The Importance of Active Line Management

12 / 12 / 2014

There is no more important managerial relationship at a workplace than that of an employee and line manager. The manager supervises the employees in some things, coordinates their work, encourages them and generally makes sure that a team of employees performs its tasks efficiently and effectively. But today’s line managers have so many other responsibilities in addition to managing team...

Sticking to The Letter

08 / 12 / 2014

Last week two of our clients carried out disciplinary investigations and invited their respective employees to discipline meetings in consequence. The meetings went ahead and then I discovered that they had either only gone off-piste in one case had starting talking about something else altogether. In the other, the organisation had only put half the allegation in the letter requiring...

Why Are We So Caught up Over the Living Wage?

05 / 12 / 2014

This week the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement was given and while there was relatively little from an employment point of view (National Insurance on young apprentices to be abolished and personal tax allowance to increase to £10,600 next April) there were a number of other interesting details, the main offering being the changes to stamp duty. Ever since then, the various...

Is it Really Incompetence?

03 / 12 / 2014

When our employees are not performing, that is, they are not doing what we ask them to do in the way we ask them to do it, we usually blame the employee. In a less guarded moment we might call them a bunch of incompetent idiots and oh how we wish we could find better people to employ. If only...

Testing the Market

01 / 12 / 2014

Recently we have been doing a lot of work on recruitment, both for some of our clients and to add to our own team. In particular we have been looking, via an international student placement organisation, for a student to join us on an internship to do some marketing. As part of the recruitment process we asked the students to...